Ibrahim Ince and Ezgi Özdemir explore how the material world records Cyprus’s division. Ibrahim recounts his grandmother’s decades-long care for his missing grandfather’s clothes—an act of mourning through objects. Ezgi follows water and electricity across the Green Line, showing how pipelines, dams, and informal exchanges reveal both cooperation and denial between north and south. Everyday items—a refrigerator too wide for a checkpoint, a rusted washing machine, a protest against privatized water—become metaphors for living with constraint. Through ethnography and material culture, the guests show how infrastructure shapes moral and political life. Their conclusion: the partition is felt not only in treaties and maps but in the intimate textures of homes and streets, where adaptation and endurance coexist.

Recorded on 19 May 2025, this is the fourth in a special series of podcasts that emerged from Partitioning for Peace,TLP’s 2024 conference at City, University of London. For an introduction to the series as a whole, click here. These podcasts were supported by the Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Grant, and the UK Prevention Research Partnership (Violence, Health and Society; MR-VO49879/1). 

Episode 77 – Material Cultures and Landscapes of Partition

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

MUSIC CREDIT: Gregory Davis, Ocean View (Epidemic Sounds).